Scotland is home to an impressive array of inventors whose ideas changed the world: John Logie Baird created television, Alexander Graham Bell gave us the telephone, Charles Macintosh discovered the impregnation of fabrics, James Watt perfected the steam engine, and John Dunlop popularized the pneumatic tire.
But among these bright names stands an almost forgotten genius – Robert William Thomson, the man who invented the pneumatic tire a full 43 years before Dunlop and whose ideas remained far ahead of his time. His story is both astonishing and inspiring, and deserves to be told.
Robert William Thomson patented his invention, the pneumatic tire, on December 10, 1845, a full 43 years before it was reinvented by John Dunlop.
Thomson’s pneumatic tire was demonstrated in Regent’s Park, London, in 1847, proving to all present that it could both reduce noise and improve passenger comfort. But who was Robert William Thomson, and what else did he invent?
Robert was born in Stonehaven on the north-east coast of Scotland in 1822. He was the son of a woollen mill owner and at the age of 14 was sent to Charleston, South Carolina, USA, to live with an uncle and learn a trade.
Two years later he returned to Scotland, where he worked on various inventions, interned in engineering workshops in Aberdeen and Dundee, and studied engineering in Edinburgh and Glasgow. While working in Edinburgh, he invented a system for detonating destructive explosives using electricity. He then went to London and joined the South Eastern Railway.
In 1845, when Thomson was 23 years old, he received a patent for his invention, the pneumatic tire. It was a hollow leather tire with a rubber fabric tube filled with air inside.
Although a set of his “air wheels” could travel about 2,000 km in an English carriage, the rubber for the inner tubes was so expensive that production became unprofitable, and pneumatic tires were forgotten for almost half a century.
Only the growing popularity of the bicycle later revived interest in tires, and in 1888 John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinarian living in Belfast, received patents for a pneumatic tire for bicycles, tricycles, and other vehicles. Dunlop later lost his main patent when it was discovered that Thomson had already patented the principle of the pneumatic tire.
Despite the obvious advantages of the pneumatic tire, Robert’s invention turned out to be about fifty years ahead of its time, as in 1845 not only were there no automobiles, but bicycles were just beginning to appear on city streets. This lack of demand, combined with the high cost of production, reduced pneumatic tires to a mere curiosity.
Undeterred, Robert continued and in 1849 patented the principle of a fountain pen with an ink reservoir.
In 1852, Robert accepted a position on the island of Java, where he worked as an engineer on a sugar plantation, improving existing sugar-making machinery and designing new equipment, including the first mobile steam crane and a hydraulic dry dock.
It was in Java that he met and married Clara Hertz, with whom he had two sons and two daughters. The family eventually returned to Edinburgh in 1862 due to Robert’s failing health.
However, his health problems did not seem to slow him down, as in 1867 he developed the first successful mechanical road transport vehicle, the steam tractor. He also patented solid rubber tyres that allowed his heavy steam engines to travel on roads without damaging them.
By 1870, “Thomson’s steam engines” were being manufactured and exported all over the world.
Robert died on 8 March 1873 at his home in Edinburgh at the relatively young age of 50, and was buried in Dean Cemetery.
But even this did not slow him down completely, as the last of the fourteen patents registered in his name, this time for elastic belts, was filed later that year by his wife Clara.
It was not until fifteen years later that another Scotsman, John Boyd Dunlop, reinvented Robert Thomson’s pneumatic tyre. This time, however, the world had already caught up with the idea, namely bicycles, which were widely available, and new “self-propelled” cars were beginning to appear, and so it was Dunlop’s name, not Thomson’s, that remained recorded in history.
The story of Robert William Thomson is an example of how even brilliant ideas sometimes get ahead of their time. Despite creating the first pneumatic tire decades before Dunlop and registering numerous patents in various fields, Thomson remained almost forgotten because the world was not yet ready to appreciate his invention.
It was only later, when bicycles and motor vehicles entered life en masse, that his vision found recognition – although his name remained in the shadows. Today, Thomson stands out as a shining example of an inventor, whose contributions deserve a place in history alongside the greatest Scottish innovators.
Illustrative Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photo-of-a-man-looking-at-a-car-tire-13746763/
